out of season 2

Since I can't find a way to format the layout of pictures in Blogger (always get slapped up on the top), my carefully-conceived layouts get bloggered. I give up, one post per picture.

Mosel vine, showing evidence of a moister climate than is usual for winegrowing regions. I expect a stony feel to the wine. No country for cotton socks, this.

As it turned out, everything was still closed until Easter weekend. Eventually found a place to taste wine in Zell/Mosel, but they had run out of trocken wines. All the sweet ones tasted identical to me. I could not distinguish any character, only sweetness. At dinner in Reil, I'd had a sweet Riesling, but it had lots more going on than just sweetness, rather a delicious gulp in fact. I figured I'd get a Beerenauslese just for the fun of it, but they'd run out of that too and I had to settle for a Riesling Eiswein.

In the hotel, I was going to drink the half-bottle of white in the minibar, but it turned out to be French. According to mine hostess, there are only 3 vineyards on the whole Mosel that produce half-bottles: they bottle in late April, so by March there's usually none available. Extraordinary.

out of season

Back in Germany on company business. Notes from a previous visit are on a different branch, but still apply for the most part.

Currently in a little hotel in Reil on the Mosel river. The Mosel itself looks more like the Big Muddy, and it's raining as is usual in March. My hotel is exactly as it appeared in the brochure, a small converted house, quite charming - except for the scaffolding all over the outside and blocking my view of the river. Humph. Oh well mine hostess is sweet, the town itself is quaint, I'm sure I can find some wine to drink here.

Upon arrival at the airport, they had no cars at all. I took the first one offered, ein plutokretz-mobil. Shown above at the graveyard outside Lotzbeuren, a town I had not planned to visit. It has a fine old cobbled town square with a church big enough to house the entire town. The graveyard is possibly the best-maintained in all Christendom. See picture above, in 'out of season 6'.

Corinne Ellen Kretzmann

September 13 1925 to January 17 2008

We pray.. for rest to the soul of the departed in a place of light, in a place of repose, in a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, sorrow, and suffering.
- Orthodox Memorial service.

We the living can do nothing for the dead but remember them. In time all the memories of my mother will be perfected, in the single remembrance of God or oblivion.

Until then all I can do is remember to celebrate her life, a life that did good in the world; a faithful life; a merry, kind-hearted life. I never knew all the stories of my mother's life. By now, some of them have traveled past the boundaries of forgetting. This looks like the end of the tale, but of course it is not. Ma lives on in the families of her children, and in the greater family of all those who loved her. It is only the closing of a chapter. All of the new stories run back into this story, and beyond.
I will remember this merry, kind-hearted life.

nunc est bibendum

"Running out into the summer rain with mouth wide open to catch the heavy raindrops; drinking milk from the ladle in the cowshed down on the farm during the long vacation; later in life, searching for truth in a wineglass - those are just a few of the stages in the evolution of a being.

To blame, of course, is that thirst which befalls poor mortals as soon as they see the light of day and which never lets up again afterwards. Feeling its intensity rise, our smallest contemporaries emit an appropriate acoustic signal (the primeval yell).

To blame too is the thirst for knowledge which fires our ingenuity in devising ever more thirst-quenchers (monks showing the way with holy glee)."

This appears to be a translation from the original German, on the Hotel Schloss Zell website. Marvellous, whatever language it originated in.. holy glee indeed.

Image from the inimitable Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

Edit 2010: for some inscrutable reason this post shows up on the second page of results for Googling "nunc est bibendum translation": but I do not in fact provide a translation. Sorry folks. Here's a good one, from a Pharyngula comment: 

"Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus

Now is the time to drink, now the time to dance on the earth. Horace goes on to explain that there will be no drinking or dancing in the afterlife."

Children's Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R.S. Thomas

rehabilitation

When I was young, I used to work out a lot, and rehabilitate injuries occasionally. Now I'm old, I rehabilitate a lot, and work out occasionally. Bah.

I have my first overuse injury from swimming, some kind of rotator cuff problem. Suspect infraspinatus tendonitis but it hardly matters, since the rehab is going to be much the same whichever of the rotator cuff components is busted. Usually with overuse injuries, the cause can be tracked back to some change - more volume or intensity in workouts, new running shoes, old running shoes, etcetera. This time nothing changed, swimming the same distances and intensities as in the past seven years. Then I realized, oh something did change - I got older :-( again :-(

Frankly I'm devastated. Swimming used to be a reliable fallback position, whenever some run or bike or paddling injury sidelined me from the usual pursuits, I could work out as hard as I liked in a swim, with no let or hindrance. Now it's gone, and probably forever: tendinitis in my experience is never cured, only managed. So, I can add regular shoulder icing, stretching and strengthening, to the routine of achilles icing, stretching and strengthening. No time left for actual workouts..

me and Moominpappa

"I cannot stress enough the perils of your friends marrying.. One day you are all a society of outlaws, adventurous comrades and companions who will be pushing off somewhere or other when things become tiresome; you have all the world to choose from, just by looking at the map...
... and then, suddenly, they're not interested any more. They want to keep warm. They're afraid of rain. They start collecting big things that can't fit in a rucksack. They talk only of small things. They don't like to make sudden decisions and do something contrariwise. Formerly they hoisted sail: now they carpenter little shelves for porcelain mugs. Oh, who can speak of such matters without shedding tears !"
Moominpappa's Memoirs, Tove Jansson.

And how much worse it is when you marry in fact your own self, carpentering quietly in a warm little house and wondering where it all went, what was all that ?